Osborn Fiber Studio

You’re my friend, right? So you’ll pretend this was posted a week ago. Because what’s a week in the grand scheme of our lives? Well, come to think of it, a week is a lot when you’re dealing with fresh vegetables.

It’s hard to believe that in the middle of May, just a little more than a month ago, I had not yet started CPE. Back then, I had time to go to things like potlucks, and to carefully plan meals. Thankfully, I have a husband and mother who like food as much as I do, and they have helped a lot with the cooking while we transition into this very different lifestyle. We’ve made it work, and only a couple of things ended up going bad. Mostly the ridiculous amounts of green onions.

Week #5:

• Kale – this ended up going into a fun salad, inspired by a fellow foodie’s contribution to a school potluck.
• Ramps! – This time I made Ramp Pesto, half of which went straight onto GF pasta, and half of which went into my growing pesto collection in the freezer.
• Black turtle beans – long-term storage.
• Tomatillo salsa – om nom nom. Fajitas are a staple food around here, and we went through this pretty quick.
• Apple sauce – Um, this was delicious. I don’t know what they did to it (the label slid right off when we got it) but it was so good. Naomi and I did a murder on this, just snacking. If I ever make my way down to the Penn’s Corner store, I will stock up on more of this.
• Canned tomatoes – This ended up going into something my mom made while I was at work, but I don’t really remember what it was. I’m sure it was fabulous.
• Rhubarb – I fulfilled my highly important work of making the annual rhubarb pie. This year I used this recipe – no strawberries. It was okay, but honestly it was too sweet. I made a GF crust from scratch, but the Bob’s Red Mill GF AP flour that I can get in bulk, just has a very strong odd taste to it. So it was not my best pie. But Jared really like it. And it looked pretty.

Scott Bacula is pretty too.

 

 

The idea was good – a sweet custard filling to pour on rhubarb. I would try it again, with less sugar, a different crust, and a few strawberries just for happiness.

Week #6:

• Rhubarb – Actually, this rhubarb went into the above pie too.
• Fiddleheads – Fiddleheads are so fun! They went into a super-simple salad – mostly I just cooked them. Tasty but weird. A definite novelty.
• Spinach – I think I tossed this in a salad?
• Romaine lettuce – Definitely salad. When the heck else do you do with lettuce?
• Green onions – Thus began the inundation of green onions. We started putting them in everything. Salads, anytime anything was roasted, anytime anything called for any onions at all… green onions were chopped up and put in. They are sweeter and lighter than regular onions, but quite compatible.
• Red potatoes – see the next entry.
• Radishes – These got cut in quarters – along with chopped up red potatoes, a few sweet potatoes we had lying around, and of course some green onions just because – and thrown in the oven to roast for a while. Frankly, I didn’t let them cook long enough. We were in a hurry with a mangled dinner, and didn’t even end up eating any of this the same night! But I had hearty lunches for the next week.

Oh, Fiddleheads. so funny and leafy, and potentially toxic!

   

Week #7:

• Green onions – um, yeah. see above. They started going funny after a while; we lost a few out of this batch. Finally my mom fried some up with mushrooms as a side dish, which was randomly delicious.
• Romaine lettuce – Saaaalaaaaad
• Red leaf lettuce – omigosh, salad!
• Kale – Another kale salad like the one linked above.
• Feta cheese – Livened up the aforementioned SALAD!
• Apple cider – disappeared. So delicious.
• Parsley seedling – A little bit of this has been used… and it seems to be surviving on the porch okay, now that I’ve repotted it. I don’t use parsley that much, and I feel a little guilty about it. I guess I need to start throwing it in random stuff. Like green onions.

Week #8:

• Fresh dill – I struggled with this one. It was so pretty, and I didn’t want it to go to waste, but I was at a loss. I ended up making a big batch of tsatsiki sauce – one of Jared’s favorites. Somewhat contradictorily, we ended up using it in place of raita alongside some indian I made that week. Greece and India are sorta close to each other, right?
• Rhubarb – Jared found a recipe in a Martha Stewart cookbook we have for pork chops with rhubarb compote. We cooked up our pork steaks from our quarter pig, and oh my goodness. Forget pie; that’s what’s happening to next year’s rhubarb.
• Green onions – I start contemplating making green onion pesto. Mental note to google it. Mental note forgotten.
• Mixed greens – Salad agaaaaain
• Red leaf lettuce – I am a rabbit.
• Apple butter – I ended up impulsively buying a butternut squash, inspired by this apple butter, and a friend who used to just chop a butternut squash in half, fill the seed cavity with apple butter, and cook it forever. I did this, but it ended up being REALLY weird having those distinctive fall flavors with very spring/summer salads. The last of the squash ended up going into these super-paleo brownies for a friend’s birthday.
• Maple syrup – We’ve actually been going through our maple syrup lately, because I’ve been making a lot of sourdough pancakes on Saturday mornings. (Speaking of which, I have a post brewing about sourdough experiments…)
• Ruby Chard – I just had to make my favorite chard dish, Ruby Chard decorated with itself. (I bought the book, but you can find the recipe here.) Walnuts instead of pine nuts, I think. Isn’t it beautiful stuff?

Week #9

• Collard greens – I made a really traditional collard green recipe from Paula Deen, throwing in a ham bone from the 1/4 pig. Because it was Paula Deen, it was insanely flavorful, but knowing how weird collards can be, I didn’t hold back. (I did throw in some bacon fat instead of butter. I don’t think that hurt.)
• Green onions (oh my gosh).
• Bibb lettuce – Salad salad salad
• Red leaf lettuce – stiiiil moooore salaaaad
• Tomatillo salsa – Also disappeared. Fajitas are easy when you always have corn tortillas, brown rice, and cans of black beans lying around.
• Watermelon Radish – I finally made this into radish chips this week. Thank you, mandolin slicer! Cooked until they just start to get crispy, they end up weirdly sweet and very yummy.
• Black turtle beans – long term storage.

Week #10 – I pulled in a little help this last week. Partly because a friend had a problem with her share, but partly because I needed at least ONE DAY with neither salad nor guilt for not eating salad. I must be ready to get back on the salad train, because today I went out for lunch and split – a salad – with my mom. And I was totally inspired, since it involved chicken, asparagus, pesto, and goat cheese. How HANDY that at least one of those things showed up in a box…

• Red lettuce – I sucked it up and had SOME salad.
• Scapes! – I just turned these directly into pesto for the freezer. Too much going this week on to do anything fancy.
• Mixed greens – shared
• Romaine lettuce – shared
• Kale – shared
• Hot pepper jelly – long term storage. Though I salivate every time I look at it.
• Goat milk chevre – haven’t used this yet, but it’s in the cheese drawer, looking at me temptingly. I keep putting off using it, wanting to save it for just the right recipe… but that’s way too much pressure to put on a cheese. I need to chill out and just eat it. Probably on a salad.
• Braeburn apples – These have nearly disappeared just being eaten with lunches. This is surprising, because Jared’s been out of town, and I’m not a big apple eater. But these are tasty, flavorful, and small, which is kinda nice. There are a couple left, waiting to be turned into kvass or something.

Over two months into the CSA! And halfway through CPE! I’m so glad that nearly everything has gotten used – a few lettuce leaves get wilty here and there because we can’t keep up with them, but I’m motivated to get some more original salads going. It’s been a restful weekend, despite preaching today. I needed that. And I get July 4th off. We are SO gonna make it through this.